This book is difficult to get into at times, but the cultural elements that it reveals are fascinating. More than that, the stories are generally truly intriguing. There is a lot of depth here that almost seems to require at least a second reading to appreciate. There was a bit too thin of a line between story and truth, as well as generalizations and accurate representation, for me, but that is almost nitpicking. My one big issue is that the outright Chinese stories, such as the one about Fa Mulan, take up a bit too much space in the book when I am wanting to read about Kingston. Still, extremely worth reading as a whole. Many of the family stories are extremely sad, but they pulled me in nonetheless. ( )

Maxine Hong Kingston takes a brave leap and shares with the world her childhood feeling of indefinite belonging. Growing up torn between two cultures, Maxine struggled to find her place in the world. Add that to her mother's conflicting talk-stories about what it means to be a woman and you can clearly understand the internal conflict the author felt during her childhood. Written in the form of five separate yet connected stories Hong Kingston takes us along for the ride as she connects with both of her cultures and finds her place in the world. Her bravery in telling the stories no traditional Chinese woman would dare to tell earns her the respect she deserves. I highly recommend allowing Maxine Hong Kingston to take you on this indelible and incredible ride as I did. It is something you will always remember, and a well written tale you will enjoy time and time again. ( )

“The Woman Warrior” is haunted with ghosts: Mexican ghosts, Negro ghosts, white ghosts, janitor ghosts, teacher ghosts, and so on. I don’t mean this to be a paranormal or spiritual observation. Kingston uses the term so casually, we know what she is talking about – a ghost is almost anything or anyone outside of her Chinese-born family – but that still left me wanting a fuller explanation. We don’t get one. So, what is a ghost? It is something that, despite its seeming absence, leaves a trace of itself, a residue that can’t be erased. It’s a metaphor that runs throughout the entire book, and is extraordinarily apropos for a book that is, at its core, about the archetypical clash of two cultures.

I enjoyed the novel as a total reading experience – and I suppose there’s not a lot more you can ask from a book – but I felt because I wasn’t a Chinese woman, that I was missing something vitally important. I figured that most of the people who have probably enjoyed it haven’t been either of these things, so I tried to ignore how awkwardly self-conscious the book made me feel about my own identity, and trudged merrily on.

The book is about a lot of things – growing up in the United States with parents who were born in their native China; the difficulties one has living with parents who have yet to become properly acculturated even though you as a daughter are already intimately familiar with that culture; even what it means to be Chinese, and how the weight of Chinese history and civil mythology can weigh heavily on someone who hasn’t even set foot in that country. The book is composed of five vignettes or chapters, which don’t flow in a chronological way, but revolve around the same characters: Maxine, her mother, her female Chinese relatives she’s never met.

I can see how this would have been a punch to the literary establishment’s gut when it was published nearly forty years ago, on the coattails of “Fear of Flying” and a myriad of other works important to the feminist tradition. Not only does Kingston’s story recognize her womanhood and coming to terms with that in a particular time and place in the United States, she complicates matters by recognizing her Chinese heritage, which has very different ideas of what it means to be a good daughter, a feminine woman, and so on.

This has been sitting on my bookshelf staring at me for several years now, and I’m glad that I finally chose to read it. Is it something that I’m likely to ever read again? Probably not. It’s exactly the kind of book that college students across the humanistic disciplines – sociology, anthropology, cultural studies – should be exposed to: horizon-expanding and full of ideas to widen the minds of parochial university freshmen, i.e., kids that need the aforementioned culture clash. Once out of school, many people would never again admit to reading for self-edification. I’m not one of those, and self-edification was part of the reason I read this book. It’s just that every time I stop to think about it, I can’t help but think all over again of how self-conscious it made me of being a privileged white male. I know, I know. #FirstWorldProblems ( )

Another annotation for Dr. Walling's class in library school. This was a really good read.

"A Chinese-American woman grapples with separate cultural textures embedded in her childhood. As she relates tales of her family's multi-generational roots in China and America, her resentment of Chinese stigmas imposed on women grows fiercer. In reaction, she sculpts her own set of mores, distilling ancient ways with modern enlightenment." ( )

Wikipedia in English (2)

The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author's America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts"--the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost--with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and defiance of the pain.